E-Newsletter Index

October 2009

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NHEC Blog Keeps You in the Loop!

Explore the NHEC Blog for information on new resources, exciting projects, best practices, and more. Posts include details of third-graders from Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School in Alexandria, VA, exploring a local 1939 library sit-in; information about starting your own National History Club chapter; and coverage of John Quincy Adams’s Twitter account!

History Content

This website presents a valuable collection of resources for examining the Salem Witch trials of 1692. There are full-text versions of the three-volume Salem Witch trial transcripts, an extensive 17th-century narrative of the trials, and full-text pamphlets and excerpts of sermons by Cotton Mather, Robert Calef, and Thomas Maule. The site also offers four rare books written in the late 17th and early 18th centuries about the witchcraft scare, as well as descriptions and images of key figures. Explore…

Best Practices

Teaching with Textbooks: Getting Meaning Through Language Analysis

Do your students groan that the textbook is boring or difficult? It may be that they are unfamiliar with the academic language that history textbooks use. Linguists Mary Schleppergrell and her colleagues developed a technique while working with middle school and high school history teachers and students. Students identify the grammatical elements of each sentence in a textbook passage and see how the elements relate. In the process, they not only develop literacy skills but also notice the choices textbook authors make in presenting historical meaning. Continue reading here.

Teaching Materials

Ask a Master Teacher: Resources on Native American History

Recently, the NHEC received a question from a teacher asking about resources for teaching Native American history. Consider the readers in the Bedford Series in History and Culture. Three of these paperback readers address Native American history, including The Cherokee Removal and The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. Each reader begins with an introductory essay that provides an overview narrative of the topic and its historiographical context. Following this essay are selected primary and secondary sources accompanied by orienting background information. More....

Teaching Materials

Lesson Plan Review: The Boston Massacre: Fact, Fiction, or Bad Memory

With iconic historical events such as the Boston Massacre it can be difficult to separate historical fact from myth. This lesson for 4th through 6th graders acquaints students with some of the subtleties of constructing historical accounts. It allows them to see firsthand the role of point of view, motive for writing, and historical context in doing history. The lesson opens with an anticipatory activity that helps illustrate to students how unreliable memory can be, and how accounts of the past change over time. Read more here.

TAH Grants

Lesson Learned: Dynamic vs. Static Models for TAH Professional Development

John Trampush, coordinator for the Alaska Network for Understanding American History, writes, “For educators privileged to help implement a TAH project, perhaps the most important question that we can ask ourselves is: how can we make our projects even better? Each new TAH project funded by the Office of Innovation and Improvement creates a new learning organization, centered on the understanding and teaching of American history. But these organizations can be very different depending on the vision and professional development (P-D) model that organizers use to implement their goals and processes.” Continue reading here.

Professional Development

Online Workshop: The Cult of Domesticity
Register Now – Deadline is October 9

Join the National Humanities Center online and learn about the Cult of Domesticity, a societal ideal promoted especially during the mid- to late-19th century. It provided a behavioral handbook, a 'code,' for middle-class white women in America that served as a way to value, to judge, and to control how they would both see themselves and be understood by others. The workshop will take place on October 28, 2009. The cost is $35. Recertification credit is available. More...

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